Battle Damage Assessment
Day One of Operation Epic Fury
An Israeli strike at 8:15 AM local time appears to have possibly ended the career of Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei. Reuters is reporting that Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian were present at the meeting, while Israeli Channel 12 is reporting that Khamenei “was likely killed” and “hurt at the very least”.
By my count, this is the fifth time that the IDF has struck a meeting where top-level leaders of an aggressor power had gathered: they have done this to Hezbollah twice, the Houthis once, and Iran twice. For some reason — perhaps the fatalism of fundamentalists, or a false sense of superiority over the ‘dirty Jew’ — Israel is blessed with stupid enemies that keep holding convenient gatherings where they can be killed in a single decapitating strike.
Iranian news outlet Mehr reported that Israeli-US airstrikes had killed 57 students at a school in southern Iran. While this is hard to credit, much less confirm, CNN ran with the story, anyway. “Another Iranian news agency posted video purporting to show extensive damage to the school, with smoke rising from the building, as well as cranes lifting debris”, CNN regurgitates breathlessly.
Really? They got cranes to the scene that quickly? In Iran? Really? No, not really. The putative “school” turns out to be part of an IRGC Navy base. The missile that hit it was a failed launch by the IRGC and the story is simply propaganda slop. Actual Iranian high school students are posting videos of themselves giddily watching the Supreme Leader’s compound go up in smoke. The lies will continue to intensify as the regime dies, becoming ever more delusional.
Iran retaliated by striking five neighbor countries that had been sitting out the war. Strangely, they did not attack Israel at all. The American base in Bahrain was hit by a Shahed drone, while a ballistic missile struck a civilian complex nearby; an apartment building was struck by a drone tonight. Neutral Kuwait says they “dealt with” missiles aimed at them; so does Jordan. Qatar says they intercepted one missile, and one citizen of the Emirates was killed by falling debris from an Iranian missile. The most powerful of the countries targeted, the Saudi kingdom, has now become a co-belligerent against Iran. Tehran has managed to unite the region against them.
Not only was this missile fire counterproductive, it was puny. Both US and IDF forces have targeted Iran’s missile infrastructure: factories, bases, launchers and launch sites. Because Iranian communications are clearly compromised — how else would the Israelis know where and when Khamenei was meeting Pezeshkian? — command paralysis is likely a factor, too. Orders to launch that never arrive are also never followed. Cyber and EW capabilities further complicate the command and control necessary for an effective missile salvo that might saturate and overwhelm someone’s defenses.
Israel and the US have also put most of Iran’s state media organizations out of action. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is the military arm of the regime, is clearly flailing now. Gen. Ebrahim Jabbari, who likely will not survive another 48 hours, went on one of the remaining channels to declare that the missiles they had sent already were “from the back of the stockpile”, while Iran has weapons that the world has “never seen before”. Watch his body language. Jabbari is puffing up to seem dangerous. This is instinctive, not something he has thought about a lot.
So far, the strikes do not appear to target the personnel of Artesh, Iran’s regular armed forces. Prayer apps have been hacked, issuing messages urging the security forces, and especially Artesh, to stand down. As I have repeatedly pointed out for readers, Artesh exists to defend Iran from invasion, which is not happening, and it is distrusted by the clerics because they sat out the 1979 Revolution, which is why the IRGC exists. This parallel military force is an added economic inefficiency that has helped to make regime collapse inevitable, even without American or Israeli actions.
Were sanctions entirely lifted today, the collapse of the Iranian state would still happen because there are multiple internal crises of the regime’s own making, problems that the IRGC has created and compounded. Drought, plus overconsumption of water resources, plus irrational dam-building, plus mismanagement and corruption, equals crisis. Half the economy is gray or black, while the rest is dominated by bonyads, holding companies that are ostensibly charities, but are actually Iran’s mode of state capitalism dominated by the IRGC and the clerics. Regime collapse will also collapse these economic structures. Put simply, no matter what happens now, Iranians must expect a tough road to economic recovery.
The next 48 hours will be determinative. Critics of American action will say that regime change through air power alone is impossible, and they are right, but the Iranians themselves are the allied ‘land army’ in Iran. If the masses take to the streets and seize the major cities, the IRGC may fight, but they will almost certainly fall. The clerics will fall with them, too, because there is very little actual popular support for the regime. In order to survive, the regime remnants must organize a civil war against their own people, now — and in all the ways listed above, the US and Israel are making that very, very hard for them.
Donald Trump’s domestic enemies are circling like vultures this weekend hoping that the IRGC will resist the Iranian people long enough to impeach him over it. In order to justify this position, they pretend that the 1973 War Powers resolution does not exist, and that the United States Constitution gives the minority party in Congress some sort of imaginary veto power over decisions by the commander-in-chief. The one scenario in which this can possibly work out well for them is if the regime still stands on Monday. If it is gone, or on the way out, Trump’s political enemies are going to look like foolish people chewing on sour grapes.
Confusion over weapons of mass destruction has certainly fed into these niggling doubts. Ask anyone opposed to the war, who supports the regime that massacres Iranians by tens of thousands to stay in place, and they will express this supposed confusion. Did the president not say Iran’s nuclear program was totally destroyed? Yes he did. Was it? Yes. Was Iran then able to reconstitute a nuclear weapon program very quickly? Also yes, because that is not a difficult thing to do.
Ali Akbar Salehi, former chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told an Iranian state TV program in February 2024 that "we have all the [pieces] of nuclear science and technology” to build a nuclear bomb. He compared a nuclear weapon to a car, which consists of “a chassis, it needs an engine, it needs a steering wheel, it needs a gearbox. Have you made a gearbox? I say yes. An engine? But each one is for its own purpose.” In other words, Iran has been working on each part of a nuclear weapon in isolation, building the capacity for rapid nuclear breakout.
Iran has ballistic missiles. If they have a nuclear detonator already designed and built, then all they need to weaponize it is some enriched uranium. They had plenty of that before, though of course it got buried in the Fordow facility when that collapsed under the bombardment of American B-2s with bunker-busters specifically designed for the mission. So while the regime is unable to restart the enrichment process there, it is also possible for them to recover some uranium and build a basic bomb, or a handful of them.
Trump clearly hoped to force Iran into giving up this program forever — it was the cornerstone of his diplomatic efforts leading up to this action. It was the regime that chose this course, that deserves 100 percent of historical blame for what is happening to them, right now. Neither of Tehran’s putative allies, China or Russia, is coming to save them. The regime is on their own, reportedly leaderless, facing a population of 90 million people who want them dead. Anything is possible, but I do not rate their chances of survival very high. We appear to have reached the point where the IRGC must decide how it wants to die.